Stellarium is a software project that allows people to use their home computer as a virtual planetarium. It calculates the positions of the Sun and Moon, planets and stars, and draws how the sky would look to an observer depending on their location and the time. It can also draw the constellations and simulate astronomical phenomena such as meteor showers, and solar or lunar eclipses.

Stellarium may be used as an educational tool for teaching about the night sky, as an observational aid for amateur astronomers wishing to plan a night's observing, or simply as a curiosity (it's fun!). Because of the high quality of the graphics that Stellarium produces, it is used in some real planetarium projector products. Some amateur astronomy groups use it to create sky maps for describing regions of the sky in articles for newsletters and magazines.

Stellarium is under fairly rapid development, and by the time you read this guide, a newer version may have been released with even more features that those documented here. Check for updates to Stellarium at the Stellarium website.

If you have questions and/or comments about this guide, please email the author. For comments about Stellarium itself, visit the Stellarium forums.

Notes for version 0.10.2

This document described release version 0.10.2 of Stellarium. The 0.10.x series bring a lot of significant changes to the project - in both the underlying structure of the program code, and in the outward appearance. The most obvious change from the 0.9.x series of releases is the new user interface.

Because of the scale of the changes in this release, a few key features of older releases are not included as they are still waiting for a new implementation consistent with the changed structure of the program. Specifically, these features are: